Watching Remus
by SongbirdNoodles
Summary: After his world falls apart, Remus flees it. Lily watches him.


I've watched you all this time, Remus. It's bad, I know it's bad to still be so absorbed in your lives and watch, all the time, unable to do anything at all to help you all. It's horrible, sometimes, but I can't seem to stop myself. I went before my time, but your life is going on, Remus, and I need to know how.

I watched the look on your face change from disbelief to horror to pain, when in the course of 36 hours too horrible to be a nightmare, you lost the five people you cared about most. I watched you sit in a Muggle café for two hours, not moving, not speaking, staring at an aged photograph. I watched you lock yourself up in a room in the Leaky Cauldron because you couldn't stand going back to live in the flat you'd shared with Sirius and stare into the fire, hating yourself because it wasn't that you didn't want to cry- you couldn't. I watched you go back to that flat and reduce every possession of Sirius Black's to shreds with angry flicks of your wand, and then let out a low howl of pain and horror, although the moon in the window wasn't even half full.

I watched you pile the clothes that were not mere shreds into your Hogwarts trunk, and watched you finally break down when you saw the four letters engraved into the ancient leather with a sharp boy's knife what seemed like a lifetime ago. I remember the night you engraved your trunks- I was sitting on James' lap, accepted into the quartet at last, and we all laughed and drank, to Moony, to Wormtail, to Padfoot, and Prongs- "and his flower!" Sirius had roared, grinning at me, and you'd all guffawed in the manner of teenage boys, understanding much more than I did. I remember how the next morning, during our prefect patrol, you apologized for your rowdy behavior, and I laughed so hard at your misplaced chivalry I thought my spine would break in two. You looked confused for a second, and then you laughed too, and we both agreed it was a good thing I was James' girlfriend, and not yours.

Five years later I watched you carry the trunk holding the few earthly possessions you'd deemed fit to keep through London. I watched you as you bought tube tickets and stepped into an approaching train. Do you remember the first time you rode a tube, Remus? You did at that moment, and so did I- you were with me, remember? We were on our way to that New Year's Party at Sirius' old place, and you couldn't believe any of it, you just stared and stared. Once you got over the shock, we talked for the hour and a half we rolled through London, and as so often, I was moved by the gentle, kind human being sitting across from me in a tattered pair of jeans and brown sweater, both of which I knew you'd bought at a thrift store minutes before meeting me, to blend into the crowds of Muggle London. I never found the words to tell you that neither that brown sweater nor that concerned look in your eyes were considered normal in the world I came from.

I watched you hurry across Heathrow Airport and buy a ticket to Australia, of all places, without saying goodbye to a single person. I know you tried- but Molly Weasley had a new baby, and Andromeda Tonks had locked herself up in her room and, it was rumored, gone insane with the pain of discovering that the one cousin she thought had escaped the grasping need for the Dark Arts that ran in her family, had in fact been consumed by it more deeply than even her sisters. I can't believe you all thought he was guilty. It's not for me to judge, I know, but I watched you and a million other people who'd loved Sirius fall apart, and I just wanted to shake all of you. But I couldn't shake you, Remus, all I could do was watch. When seeing the way Harry would spend the next eleven years as a dishtowel in my sister's household became all to painful, I turned back on you as you got off the plane, blinking against the spring of Sidney Bay. I watched you as you called on the daughter of old friends of your parents, Claire Merriweather, a tall and strong-looking woman with hair that reflected in a rainbow of colors in the sun and laughed so hard it made you wince at first. You couldn't quite deal with the sound of laughter yet, not with the way Claire laughed at everything and tried to get you to confess why you weren't laughing, either. But you moved in with her, anyway, though she would not let you pay her a single knut. She cooked you stews and broth and generally mothered you, and after a couple of months, it felt like normality.

I watched you as one day, you started working in a magical orphanage. So typical, Remus, so predictable- you couldn't take care of Harry, so instead, you took care of thirty nine Australian orphans who'd lost their parents to a bush fire several years back, which had destroyed one of the largest magical settings in the world. Thirty nine Australian orphans, Remus, and I thought my heart was going to break into shreds when I saw the favorites you were gradually picking out- twin boys with jet black hair and mischievous faces, a girl with tomato-red pigtails who sat on your lap and made her tickle you, and a little girl with dirty blond hair who was left behind during playtime because she was not as quick, funny and clever as the others.

You liked working with the children, didn't you? And gradually, the scars and gouges those nightmarish 36 hours had left you with began to heal, the lines smoothed out. Under the Australian sun, you learned to occupy yourself, and under Claire's infectious tutelage, you learned to laugh again, as painstaking as Harry's first steps in a garden on the other side of the world, running away from his still crawling cousin. You took long walks on the beaches, watching the seagulls and thinking of nothing at all. Sometimes it still happened, on Halloween you would make sure you were quite busy trick-or-treating with the children because you knew everything you had so carefully, painfully built up in the past five years wold fall apart you had a moment to think, to remember. You had your life in Australia, you were starting to call Claire's cottage on the beach "home", you were watching the children grow up, and little red-haired Jade had turned into quite the princess under your dotage. You were very well settled.

But then letters came fluttering in from England. Andromeda Tonks, who had not gone crazy at all, but simply woken up one morning and told herself that to stop the deadly virus of the Dark Arts to pass on through her family, she would have to be there for her daughter, sent you a letter telling you about the Wolfsbane potion. You were more touched than you could have expressed, I know that look on your face, but since words didn't seem enough, you never said anything at all. Minerva McGonagall wrote you too, telling you that Harry would be starting at Hogwarts this year, and could you perhaps come back, be his contact person in the wizarding world. And you couldn't face it, could you Remus, you told yourself your life in Sidney was quite comfortable, and Harry would just be confused to see you now, and whatever other excuse you made because you were afraid that Harry might like you and look just like James, and then al that old hurt would start all over again.

The children from the orphanage were becoming teenagers, and the sea was looking more beautiful than before, and then Albus Dumbledore suddenly stood before you and persuaded you to come back, to teach and meet Harry. And on your first night back in Britain, when you were missing the sea and Claire's laugh and the smell of chicken stew and the children's laughter more than you could have imagined, I watched you be chatted up by a young auror with pink hair, and I knew you would be all right, in the end.


End file.
